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Monday, February 22, 2016

I am a digital native. This may seem surprising since I was born in 1967. But I am the child of an electrical engineer who was an early adopter. Since he was buying computers early and often there was always some lesser machine rolling off the bottom of the stack for me. In 1983 I was the only kid in my high school with a computer. I was the copy editor of my high school yearbook. When all the other high schools were typing their copy on triplicate forms with typewriters, I figured out how to feed the forms through my daisy wheel printer and wrote the whole yearbook in a word processor.

This is to say I think in computer. When I want to take notes I reach for my iPad or phone. It never even occurs to me to reach for a pencil and paper. When I started knitting I kept notes in the aptly named Notes app. (Notes is especially good since the iOS 9 update because you can take pictures right in the middle of your note taking.) When I realized I was obsessed with knitting I started researching databases. I loved Filemaker Pro when I was an engineering consultant. The power of a database is compelling to me. I wanted the ability to design records with different kinds of data fields. But Filemaker Pro is way too expensive for me. I ended up buying an iPad app called Boximize. (It doesn't have a counterpoint for the Mac, which is a drawback. It also deletes everything you just typed into it if you callously go to another app. It's like the olden days when you had to actually hit Save. Only there is no Save in the app. You have to back out of what you're doing with Done. I keep thinking they'll fix their autosave in a future update.) I will discuss Boximize as a knitting app in another post.

What I want to talk about today is Numbers, the spreadsheet that comes standard on all iPads and Macs. While a database is what I need for all the assorted information about each design, like the yarn and needles I used, final size and weight, photos of critical parts of the process to refer to later, a spreadsheet is what I want for the actual pattern. Especially a spreadsheet on iCloud that syncs automatically between my computer and my iPad.

I often download a PDF of a pattern online, select all the text, and paste it into Numbers. Then I edit it into row-by-row instructions. I may duplicate the pattern into multiple sheets and delete the stitch count for all but one size. Once I have all this organized on my computer I can go anywhere with my knitting and use my iPad as a checklist. I can add notes on a row-by-row basis in the spreadsheet on my iPad. If I use the same pattern again I add a column and make a separate set of notes for the next time I make it. Then eventually I may duplicate it to a new sheet, change the version number and revise the whole pattern if I come up with a better way of doing it. You can do all this directly on your iPad but it's kind of frustrating. I clicked all around on it and couldn't figure out how to save a file as a template. But you can do it on your Mac and save it to the iPad to use it.

Here is my standard Numbers template for a knitting pattern, as seen in a screen shot of my iPad.

Here's how to create this knitting pattern template for Numbers on your Mac.

Open Numbers by clicking the bar graph in the Dock or find it in the Applications Folder in Finder.

File: New — Choose a Template should come up. I started with Basic Checklist. Click that choice and then Choose in the bottom right of the box.

Change the default words. I changed CHECKLIST to NAME, and the Checklist in the tab I changed to Version. Double click on the word to highlight it and type over it

I changed Date to Instructions and Task to Notes

I duplicated the checklist column because I kept forgetting if I checked it before or after knitting the row. If I have a box to check for both I know where I am when I pick it up again. If they are both checked I stopped at the end of the row. To duplicate a column select the letter at the top. Copy it (command C), select the C column and right click (two finger tap on track pad, control click for one button mouse) Select Add Column Before. Paste into the new column.

Select Column D now and add another column before it for the stitch count.

Resize your columns. You can select all of them and hover over the line between letters until the cursor has two arrows sticking out. Double click. This makes them all very small. Now stretch out Instructions and Notes to fill the window the way you like it. Select the column and hover over the line to get the cursor to change to two arrows. Click and drag to size.

Add more rows to your spreadsheet by grabbing the = at the bottom and dragging it down.

Now you can save this as a template to use next time. From the File menu select Save as Template. You'll get a dialog box asking Create a custom Numbers template? You can add this spreadsheet to the Template Chooser, or save it to your computer. Select Add to Template Chooser. (The Template Chooser is what you saw when you created a New File. A thumbnail of the spreadsheet you just created will appear in a box with a place for you to type a name for it. I named mine Knitting Pattern. If you right click it you can rename it or delete it.)

How to get this on your iPad? Save the file as Knitting Pattern. Open Numbers on your iPad. (If it's not there go download it from the App Store.) When you see the list of spreadsheets you'll see your Knitting Pattern file. Select it. You'll get a dialog box asking Add to Template Chooser? You'll be able to use this template to create new Numbers spreadsheets. Click Add. Now your creation is available on your iPad too.

Now when you go to File: New you can select My Templates and see your empty pattern. Or just scroll down and it's at the end of all the stock ones. If you download a PDF of a knitting pattern or see one on a blog you'd like to try you can select the text, copy it, go to your new file made with your template, select the top cell in the Instructions column, and paste. Try it with the numbered list above. It will put each paragraph in a cell of the spreadsheet. Now you can make your own notes for each step, delete sizes you aren't using, type the stitch count into its own column, and more. Whenever a pattern says Rows (17-28) or something like that I carefully expand that to the right number of rows to check off.

For patterns on double pointed needles I often add columns to keep track of how many stitches are on each needle. Or if I have a hat with a lot of markers I'll track stitches between markers in another column. If I am designing a hat and want to see if the number of stitches are going to come out I use formulas to calculate the stitch count for me. Spreadsheets are so handy!

Here's an example of a spreadsheet I worked on today while I was making a duck. This is an example of how sloppy you can be if you want. Just because it's a spreadsheet doesn't mean you have to make it feel like work. I am not really OCD about the checkboxes or stitch count when I'm making it up as I go. Precise row counts and stitch counts are more important when I'm doing a second of something, like a foot, to be sure they match. (Feet go from row 80 to 113, not seen in this example.) I try to jot down just enough that if I like how it turns out I can do it again, filling out the instructions to be more clear. The duck was way too hard. I'm not going to try to make this into a reproducible pattern.

Also that yarn from the fabric store had such a strong smell it gave me a migraine for the two days it took me to make this duck. You'd think I would learn.

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Learning to knit has a lot to do with feel. When I was teaching myself to knit from YouTube videos I did a lot of things wrong that turned out not to be wrong after all. I just tried stuff until I thought it felt right and then kept doing a whole scarf that way. The knit stitch will tell you if you are doing it wrong. It will feel tight and unyielding. If you are entering the stitch properly it should stretch and give in to the needle and happily take the new loop of yarn.

The first thing I knit was a seed stitch circle scarf. Seed stitch means you alternate a knit stitch and a purl stitch all the way around in a circle then on the next row you bump it over one so it comes out like a checkerboard. I think a seed stitch scarf is a good beginner scarf for combination knitting. It looks the same on the front and back and it doesn't curl. Here's how you do it.

Get some circular needles in the size given on the ball band of some yarn you like. If you only get one ball it won't be very wide. I started with bulky yarn and cheap needles from the fabric store but quickly learned to loathe them. (Needles is a whole blog post.) Here's a good starter needle on Amazon, HiyaHiya 20"

Size 11 needles. Green cable is a 16" HiyaHiya stainless steel needle.
Blue cable is a 32" Addi Turbo nickel plated brass needle. See how
much longer the needles are on the longer cable?

Circular needles means two needles with a cable in between. This saves you turning your work to go back on the other side. You just go around and around always looking at the front. It turns out that edges are a big gotcha for a beginner. So don't do 'em. 16" needles are usually for hats. But heads are bigger around than 16", right? What's up with that? Well, it turns out that you need the knitting to be kinda wadded up on the cable or it is really hard to move it along. You want a needle a lot shorter than the work you are making. (I learned this the hard way on a table runner.) But a 16" cable needle requires the working parts to be only about 3 1/2" long or you wouldn't be able to get the ends to point toward each other. On a 32" cable needle the working part is 5" long. It's probably easier to learn with more needle to hold onto. (Note: the length refers to the whole thing, tip to tip, not just the cable part.)

Here's a scarf I'm making right now. I will cut it apart when I'm done, unravel it a little way,
and tie off fringe. I hope it comes out over 60" long but the needle is only 49".

To start your circle scarf cast on a lot of stitches. Use the ball band of the yarn to decide how many. It will say how many stitches are in 4 inches. That's based on stockinette, which is tighter gauge than seed stitch. 40 inches is a good length for a circle scarf you can wrap twice, so you could multiply the number in the box by 10 and hope it doesn't come to your knees. I recommend multiplying by 8. For example, Hometown USA, a readily available colorful acrylic yarn says 9 stitches in 4 inches on size 13 needles. 9 x 8 = 78 stitches. For seed stitch in a circle you need an odd number, so add one. The smaller your yarn and needles the more stitches you will need. I like to use the cable cast on for the beginning of a long circle. Here's a good video for that. I like this channel a lot. Her handle is iknitwithcatfur. She uses natural lighting and natural audio. I like the airplanes particularly. She doesn't knit combination, but it doesn't matter.

Counting this many stitches can be a pain. I am not good at counting myself. I'm uniquely bad at it in fact. I don't try to count as I go along. I do a good mess of stitches then go back and count them. There are some tricks that help. I like to use a set of small double pointed needles. I pick up a needle to point to the stitches as I count them. I get to 10 and jam the needle in between 10 and 11. I pick up another needle, count 10 more, jam in the needle. Double pointed needles come in sets of 5, so when I get to 50 I use a marker that works like a safety pin to mark that one. Now I can retrieve the needles I used for decade markers and I don't have to count those 50 again. Work out a technique that helps you. If you like to count as you go along you can slip markers on the needle. You can't move them later though if you counted wrong so that technique is not for people with dyscalculia like me.

The next step is to join your knitting in the round. This video shows you how and illustrates what to watch out for. The scarf I'm making now I accidentally twisted it. I am going to cut it apart when I'm done so it doesn't matter, but it means I have to push the balls of yarn through the middle with every row or it gets hopelessly wrapped up.

Now let's look at a video where the demonstrator actually knits and purls the way I do. I learned a lot from watching this channel, sheruknitting.com. She is about to show you why you are doing this in the round and not flat. Notice how the edge stitches are worked differently. Also when she gets to the second row everything gets really weird. If it starts to freak you out just pause it. I have still pictures to explain what is happening.

The first row she knits is exactly what you need to do to start a seed stitch circular scarf in combination. But the second row is different because you aren't working on the back. This is what is great about this project. Let me show you in still pictures what is happening.

Gray yarn: This is what a knit stitch looks like in combination knitting.

The last row is in gray and now I'm doing a row of black. The first stitch on the left needle is the one I'm about to work. On the last row it was a knit stitch. I can tell because the yarn makes a V and the working leg of the stitch is in the front. See how it opened up easily when I inserted the right needle? That's what the working leg means. It's the one that goes off to the right. I'm holding the black yarn out of the way so you can see. But the yarn is in front and the right needle is inserted so it comes out in front of the left needle. This means I'm about to purl that black yarn. All I do is scoop up the yarn with the right needle. Down in front of it and scoop it through the loop, just like that pink yarn video, But not from the back of the needle like she does on the second row. This is because she is working on the back side of the work. In the round you stay on the front. Trust me, it's better for us combination knitters to not do seed stitch flat. (Doing ribbing in the round you get the same problem though. Ribbing is more fun to work flat. It has the same rhythm as seed stitch in the round.)

Purl stitch on right needle, knit from last row about to be dropped from left needle.

If you watch how the pink yarn video wraps the yarn that's how I did it, but the right leg of the yarn was in the front for me because I'm knitting in the round. How handy!

Now for the next stitch. This was a purl stitch on the last row so now I need to knit it. I can tell it's a purl because the loop from the last row is in the front making a little collar around the stitch. The working leg of the yarn is in the back of the left needle. I can tell I picked up the correct leg of the yarn because the stitch is nice and open. The yarn is held in back and the right needle is inserted to come out in the back ready to scoop up that black yarn that you can't really see.

Purl stitch on previous round about to be knit

Now I scoop the yarn in back and pull it through the loop. I don't really do any wrapping with my left hand, I just scoop it up.

Now if I let go with my left thumb that gray stitch drops off and my new knit stitch is on the right needle.
See how the black yarn goes from front to back?

Compare what is going on with that black yarn on the right needle between the knit and the purl. It's that back to front/front to back disparity that makes combination knitting different. If you watch more videos you will see most knitters wrap the yarn over the top of the needle to purl. This is frankly very hard. This is why people say they hate to purl. I use the same motion to knit and purl, only difference is a slight tilt of the wrist to put the yarn in front of or behind the left needle so it's in the right position to scoop it up.

The black yarn is going from back to front and it has a little gray collar around it. That's a purl stitch.
The gray yarn on the left needle is looped front to back and has no little collar. That's a knit stitch.

I like to work seed stitch this way because it gives you an extra clue what you need to do. Knit in back, purl in front. And that puts the same amount of yarn in every stitch.

Here's a video to introduce the concept that my way of knitting is incorrect. Once I accepted that I liked my way better I worked on understanding the terminology so I could watch videos by people who knit the correct way and be able to quickly transpose what they said for my twisted purl stitches. VeryPinkKnits is one of my very favorite tutorial channels. I've watched all of Staci's videos and knit several of her patterns. She knits nothing like me, but I don't care. I still learn a lot.

So you got through the cast on and the first round, what if you get back around to your end of round marker and you see you counted wrong? If you have an even number instead of an odd number of stitches, then you could end up purling the last stitch and the first stitch is also meant to be a purl instead of a knit. Here's what you do. Knit two stitches together at the beginning to get your pattern to come out. Only one row will be wrong. Be sure the working legs are both facing the same way and put the needle through two at once. Use the row below to set the pattern. BE SURE YOU GET THE FIRST ROW RIGHT! If you see you made a mistake, here's how to go back and fix it.

To get a nice wide cowl you will probably need two balls of bulky yarn. When I'm using bulky acrylic yarn I find a nice place for a join and knit a few stitches with the new yarn and then hold the two tails crossing each other like they were continuing each others path and then I sew them together with a needle and thread. I cut the extra off each side after I tie a good knot in the thread. I'm paranoid that one day I'm going to accidentally cut off the working yarn instead of the tail but so far so good.

When you get ready to bind off you should use a bigger needle if you have one. It doesn't have to be circular. Just drop the right needle and pick up a straight needle and bind off. Because you did a cable cast on you want to do a knitted bind off. This will match the other side. Be sure to alternate picking up the front and back leg of the stitches to knit them.

The last step is weaving in ends. There are good videos for this too. It depends a lot on the kind of yarn you used. For bulky acrylic you may find it best to weave the end in a little way with a needle and thread and then sew the tail to one of the legs of the yarn of the piece before cutting the tail. Weaving in straight up really only works for wool. This splitting the yarn and then knotting it technique is one I like a lot for worsted weight yarn.

*** UPDATE July 1, 2016 ***

I did 5 different swatches trying to find a cast off that would be as stretchy as the slip knot cast on. I tried Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off which is the absolute stretchiest and it still wasn't stretchy enough. I tried a rolled stockinette edge that was increased one stitch in five to have more actual stitches bound off. Still the edge was the stopping point of the stretch. What I need is a way to cast on both sides and have no side bound off. I know how to do the opposite, use a provisional cast on so both sides are bound off. But I could find no solution to this online. I decided if Jeny can make up a stretchy bind off then I can make up a way to have a cast on both sides of a steeked seed stitch scarf. What you do is cast on slipknots on a big needle and then do a modified kitchener close to marry those stitches to the edge of the scarf. The chant for doing kitchener is "knit off, purl; purl off, knit; knit off, purl; purl off, knit" For a seed stitch graft you say "knit off, knit; purl off, purl; purl off, purl; knit off, knit."

Slip knot cast on edge match in seed stitch. Right side is the graft.Doesn't look perfect as all the columns are off by half a stitch, but it FEELS like a match.

Edge on view of slip knot cast on and slip knot cast on grafted to the edge of the work.

I'm going to do a 200 stitch version of this manly color scheme. I'm seeing it with a brown barn coat or leather bomber jacket. I may try to do a video of it.

Now back to the original post.

*******

This concludes my first how-to knitting blog post, featuring how to learn to knit from YouTube when nobody is doing the same thing. I enjoyed making it, so I guess that means it's worthwhile. Also I invented a way to take pictures with my iphone using my nose so I can have both hands in the picture. Is handy the right word for that? Or nosey?

UPDATE: Here's how that scarf turned out. It is 94" wrong. I mean long. My gauge estimate was off by a factor of 2. Still, it looks good wrapped this way. It's like making a loop and passing the ends through, but there are two loops. Possibly impractical in actual use.

In my knitting research last year I learned there are many different knitting techniques with many names. There is Eastern style and Western style, referring to how the loops of yarn are mounted on the needle and how the yarn is wrapped. (Example YouTube videos of ribbing being knitted in Eastern and Western style.)

There is also Continental and English knitting (aka American). English knitting is called throwing the yarn while Continental is considered to be picking the yarn. YouTube doesn't make a distinction though. You have to know what you're looking at when you see it.

Continental Combination Knitting (fast on purpose. Slow below)

My grandmother knit continental and I have no idea why. My family is just as English as can be. Maybe she had a German governess? My aunt says we will never know. All I know is that as a baby I loved how my grandmother's hands flashed and the needles clicked. I made her show me how to do that. I learned and it stuck. When I picked up needles over 40 years later the muscle memory was still there.

Continental knitters hold the yarn in the left hand while English style knitters hold the yarn in the right hand. This distinction has nothing to do with dexterity or handedness. (Knitting left handed means working stitches from the right needle onto the left needle. I don't know why anybody would do that to themselves. All patterns would have to be transposed. There is also knitting backwards, which is useful and I will cover later.)

Holding the yarn in the left hand does not require any fine motor skills in the left hand. All the complex work is done with the right hand. There is just a fast flick of the left wrist. I know that as a right handed person I only get serious pain in my right hand, never the left. Of course this could be from everything else I do right handed that has worn out my right hand and wrist. (I'm looking at you, Felco pruners.)

English Style aka American Style

I read somewhere that the English aristocracy wanted to take up knitting but they wanted to slow it down so they didn't look like they were doing actual work. They also had a notion that showing the palms of the hands was grotesque so they wanted to knit with their hands held like they were playing the harpsichord. They came up with a new style of knitting where they completely let go of the needles with the right hand and use the whole arm to wrap the yarn around the needle. (I made that up about the harpsichord.)

I honestly have nothing against people who knit this way. I happily watch their videos with no confusion. I think it is probably way easier to see what they are doing. (Disclaimer: The above GIF is me trying to copy the way I've seen people knit on YouTube and I have no idea if I'm even doing it right. I don't know how they actually hold the yarn to keep the correct tension. This is meant to just be a rough comparison of the techniques. Think more "What language are they speaking?" and less "What did they just say?")

What ultimately determines how much you enjoy your knitting is how much it makes your hands hurt and how does it look when you finish. While throwing or picking the yarn won't matter to the finished product, how MUCH yarn you throw or pick will. Meaning it's important to keep the same tension for purl and knit stitches. This is why I knit combination. It's always an underhand motion of the needle to pull the yarn through the stitch. Lots of blogs address what to do about something called "rowing out." This is when straight knitting looks lumpy because purl stitches put more yarn in every other row than knit stitches when it's done the "correct" way.

Combination is a more balanced way of doling out the yarn. Also in "correct" knitting the purl stitch is wrapped the opposite way of the knit. A lot of people find this difficult and sort of hate to purl. In combination you wrap the yarn the easy way all the time.

Here's a GIF with a knit stitch (on the front of the work) and a purl stitch (on the back of the work) mashed together and put on repeat. I slowed down the needle scooping the yarn to try to emphasize how it's the same motion. The knit side of the fabric is the smooth side that flips to the front. The purl side is the bumpy side that flips into shadow.

Knit in back. Purl in front.

Purling underhand puts the working leg of yarn in the back when you turn the work to knit the other side. It also means both sides take the same amount of yarn and they are more likely to come out even.

Most patterns are written for Western style. If it's all garter stitch then everything still works for Combination. If you never purl then the working leg is always in the front and you knit just like Western knitters. You only knit into the back leg of the stitch if you purled it from the other side. If you are knitting stockinette in the round you always knit in the front leg of the stitch.

To transpose Western patterns to Combination learn to read and feel your knitting to know which leg of the stitch to work.

Once you know that they expect the front leg to always be the working leg you can do any increase or decrease that contains a stitch purled on the last row by simply flipping the stitch on the left needle to the Western orientation before you work it. This is relevant for slip-slip-knit (SSK) and knit 2 together (k2tog) as well as for knitting through the back loop (ktbl). Purl 2 together on the purl side of stockinette, no change necessary. I'll do a post on all this later.

Note on Fisherman's Rib video link (Illustration for Eastern Style above): Fisherman's rib is one of the first things I knit because I loved how the video presenter said "knit one below." I never really figured out how she was wrapping the yarn (Eastern Style) so I kind of just did it by feel. I am sure I was getting my stitches twisted all kind of the wrong way. But by knitting in the stitch below on the next row the stitch orientation on the needle is totally irrelevant. You can wrap the yarn any which way with fisherman's rib and it comes out the same. I even knit a cowl in fisherman's rib in the round on circular needles where every other row you have to purl instead of knit, purling the wrong way without knowing it. But in that stitch pattern the whole front leg/back leg thing doesn't even matter. You work the one below the stitch you twisted on the last row. The twist untwists itself as it falls down over the stitch making the fabric extra thick. It was while doing a long scarf in fisherman's rib I got muscle memory for purling underhand. Then I had to do more research to figure out what was going on. I was happy to learn that combination knitting had a name and even a few YouTubers.

Friday, February 5, 2016

My maternal grandmother taught me to knit when I was just a baby, sometime around 1970. She was a continental knitter (this means she held the yarn in her left hand and snagged it with the right needle.) I loved how her hands flashed too fast to even see what she was doing. The sound of her anodized aluminum needles was fascinating to me. I made her teach me how to knit against her will. Or at least that's how my aunt remembers it. I can only remember sitting on the sofa in the living room of the ancestral home with some hideous green acrylic yarn knitting a scarf for my cousin who lived in Montana. (In Beachton, Georgia the average low is 40°F in January, the coldest month of the year.) I ran out of yarn in time for Christmas and my grandmother bound off for me and I sort of gave up knitting. Soon I took up counted cross stitch instead because I liked all the different colors and designs.

Here's a crosstitch piece I made for my other grandmother
when I was about 13. My aunt gave it back to me aftermy grandmother died.

I took up knitting again in 2014 when I saw boot cuffs on Etsy and wanted some. I discovered YouTube videos that show you how to knit. The boot cuffs totally didn't work for me. I took a selfie of my first attempt and texted it to my college age niece. She nixed my fashion choice unequivocally. But by the time I realized it was a failure I was too curious to stop. The more I learned about knitting the more questions I had. Now I'm basically obsessed. I can't see a thing without wondering how I would knit that.

When I was first learning again I saw a video that explained some of the most common problems for beginning knitters, such as picking up the needles in the wrong hands and knitting back the wrong way. I realized immediately what I did wrong as an infant that made that green scarf have all those button holes. And I understood why it mysteriously got wider in the middle. And I appreciated how my grandmother returned it to the right width and let me keep going with the idea I made it like that on purpose to work like a hood.

I knit full time now, for a living. I knit things based on ideas I want to try. I let people buy what I make because I need money buy yarn and needles. And also because some of the most fun-to-knit yarn is completely itchy to me. I can't wear any animal fibers. I'm straight up allergic to lanolin. I have a chemical sensitivity type reaction to the smell of the fabric store on cheap acrylic yarn. But if I order yarn online it is less likely to have an offensive odor. I can even knit with wool if it is the extra fine merino superwash kind with all the lanolin taken out of it.

I need to figure out how to make more money with knitting so I can not only buy yarn, but also pay my bills. Selling patterns, products, teaching? I don't know. I did a lot of commissions last Christmas. I liked collecting the money for the yarn up front.

I have learned to that put anything online is like pulling your boat up alongside the black schooner flying the skull and crossbones and volunteering to come aboard and scrub their deck and fix them all sandwiches. There is absolutely nothing in it for me and a lot in it for the online pirates. My other blog has been completely scraped and reposted with ads on it, things I have written have been plagiarized, my videos have been stolen and reposted with ads or put into compilation videos edited for a fee. This bothers me. My instinct is to retreat and not give away things other people will take to make money for themselves. But at the same time I like to share things I learn. I wouldn't be doing this at all if it weren't for others giving away their knowledge for free. I am not sure what I will do, but if I figure it out you will see it here.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

I impulsively started a blog just for knitting on February 2, 2016. I have been trying to figure out how to get $72 of AdSense money from Google. There's a $100 threshold. If you close the account without earning $100 in ad views they just keep the money. I can't understand this from an accounting standpoint. How do they enter that on their books? I don't know how exactly I earned this AdSense money in the first place. Last time I checked in about 2011 my blog had made $10 in ads in 3 years so I deleted the ads. I think I must have set up that AdSense account on my YouTube channel and then when I deleted the ads on my blog it caused it to become inactive and I lost access to it. (I made a video of a sonic boom phenomenon some years ago. The short version that I think had ads on for a while. The million views version here has music I don't have the rights to, so not eligible for ads.) Anyway, in January Google transferred the funds to a new AdSense account and said in an email that if I canceled it they would pay me the money. But the cancellation screen says it will not pay a thing until I make it to $100. I have no internet properties I wish to use for revenue generation. I decided I better start another blog and drop an ad on it somewhere and see if I can get the $28 I need to make them pay out these past earnings. It's a personal challenge.Maybe this isn't a very good origin story, but it's the honest one.My other two other blogs are Spasms of Accommodation and the Beachton Buck Rivet Report. Spasms is where I work out my rants. The Buck Rivet Report was started to document my repurposing of a Spartan Aircraft trailer that became my knitting lab. As an after-the-fact effort to organize and caption thousands of work-in-progress photos it isn't going very fast. I have to wait until I feel like working on it. I'm too into knitting right now.

About Me

Nature and technology feel like home, society, not so much. That's why I set myself up as a happy hermit in a tiny house in the longleaf woods of the Gulf Coastal Plain. This is where I make things. I spend very little time doing anything that isn't directly related to making something. I even get ideas for things to make from my dreams.